My Story of Lifetime "Unpaid" Commissions

Yesterday I found a site that I have been an affiliate for a long period suddenly disappeared. This site let me make about $100 commissions every month. Not much but because I only used automatic methods like article marketing to promote it, thus it was a nice residual income. And since the site made sales, I have absolutely no idea why the site and its owner disappeared from the net.

If you have been in internet marketing industry for a period, you should know the situation in my story is very common. Sites and their owners disappeared everyday. As an affiliate, if the site you are promoting suddenly goes away, what leaves to you will just be lifetime unpaid commissions...

So do you want to protect yourself from this situation? Here are 2 suggestions that I want to share with you:

Select Affiliate Program Carefully

Is the site exist for more than 1 year? Do you know the site owner? Heard any good things about the site? Was the site owner written good articles? If you answer YES to any of these questions, then the site you are going to promote will have greater chance to keep doing business on internet.

Protect Affiliate Link

If you own a website, you should use redirection script to protect affiliate links. For example, I use http://www.marktse.com/recommend/affiliateclassroom.php to redirect to my Affiliate Classroom affiliate link.

The importance of using redirection is if the site disappears, you can redirect the landing location to another affiliate program as soon as possible. Therefore no traffic will lost from your past promotion.

If you do not have your own website, I highly recommend you get one first. Or if you like you can use short url service like tinyurl.com.

To your affiliate marketing success,

Mark Tse
http://www.marktse.com

About the Author:
This article is written by Mark Tse. Mark shares free tips, articles and downloads about Internet Marketing. You can visit his Internet Marketing Blog and read his latest posts here:

http://www.marktse.com/blog/